All I Have Left
by Goddess Isa
Summary: Dawn doesn’t have much left, does she?


TITLE: All I Have Left  
AUTHOR: Goddess Isa  
EMAIL: goddessisa@aol.com  
SUMMARY: Dawn doesn't have much left, does she?  
SPOILER: The Gift  
RATING: TV-PG  
DISTRIBUTION: http://planetslaythis.homestead.com, Fanfiction.net under Goddess Isa, anyone else, just send me the URL  
DISCLAIMER: Joss Whedon owns the characters herein. Plech.   
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Where is all this Dawn fic coming from???????  
1/31/02  
  
  
  
This is the only journal I have left now. The others, sixteen or seventeen of them with velvet covers and pretty bindings, I burned when I first found out I was "The Key". I still don't really understand all that Key and Energy shit. Why would good people have a Key to something so evil? It doesn't add up, and I think they like it that way.  
  
I started keeping journals not long after I first learned to write. I was six or seven, sitting in Buffy's room while she was out. She came home from a co-ed movie date—her first—and plopped down on her bed without even noticing me, careful not to snag her brand-new tights.  
  
She pulled a hot pink notebook out from under her pillows and began writing in it, as fast as she could, the pages flying back and forth as she added and erased things.  
  
I watched her in amazement, and when she finally noticed me there, she didn't scream at me or call for Mom. She went to her closet, took out a notebook identical to hers except for its cover being shiny blue instead of shiny pink, and handed it to me.  
  
"Here, Dawnie," she said, smiling. "Your first journal."  
  
"What's a journal?"  
  
"It's where you write down your favorite thoughts, and your dreams," she smiled and then laughed. "Some day you'll understand. Go put on your pjs, it's past your bedtime."  
  
Every night, after that one, I wrote in my journal. I babbled about the kids at school and complained when Buffy wouldn't let me hang out with her and her friends. I dripped tears on the pages when Mom and Dad split up, and scribbled frustrating things in red marker when I first met Spike.  
  
All of that is ash now, but it sits in a tin box underneath my bed because I can't bare to throw it out. It's all I have left of that life.  
  
My innocent life, the one that left for good when Buffy died.  
  
I had stopped writing in the journals long before her death, or Mom's even. Everything had stopped when the truth came out—I wasn't real, couldn't be real, didn't need to be. Once I was used as "The Key" I would be dead and no one would know I had ever been. Except maybe for me, and I didn't exist in the first place, so what was the point of keeping journals when you were never going to have teenage daughters that would discover them in a dusty trunk in the attic and marvel over the stupid things you said and did and saw?  
  
But tonight.....I don't know, tonight, something made me start. Maybe it was because, after two months and two hours exactly, I realized that life without Buffy has been...nothing.  
  
Sure, it looks like something. Tara and Willow take me with them to the Magik Shop, and they let me doodle in their Spellbooks and Anya lets me arrange the merchandise, sometimes, if she's made over a thousand dollars that day. We laugh and smile and they decide who's going to patrol where that night, and who's going to be "stuck" watching me.  
  
They never use the word "stuck", but they don't have to. I know the truth, I see it in their faces and hear it in their voices. They know that Buffy died to save me, so they have to protect me, for her. They didn't promise, like Spike, and they don't feel parental towards me, like Giles. They just do it because they think they have to.  
  
What they don't know is that I'm not the Good Little Dawnie who goes up to bed every night at nine p.m. I'm fifteen for God's sakes.  
  
I come up here, and I sit on my bed, and I just stare.  
  
I can't think, and I can't sleep, so I just stare.  
  
I stare at the walls, and the plastic moons that glow in the dark, and the boy band posters that Buffy teased me so unmercifully about.  
  
I stare at the jars full of colored sand that I made in elementary school, and the cross-stitch I made in eighth grade, and the collage of baby pictures that Buffy made me for my thirteenth birthday.  
  
It's all crap.  
  
It's all a lie.  
  
Last night, sometime around four a.m. I guess, I realized that I couldn't sit anymore. I was going stir crazy sitting and I couldn't do it for one more second, so I just grabbed a legal pad off my desk.  
  
There was two months worth of dust on it, so I wrote through the powder, sending it all over and making myself cough as I scrawled down a To-Do list with the fury of a vampire on pursuit of Spike. Or maybe I should reverse that, because Spike can be pretty vengeful when he wants to. I like to watch him get all angry, he's cute that way.  
  
Back to my list...it wound up being pages and pages long. Things I should do, that I wanted to do. Write to my mother's only sister, my Aunt Arlene, and tell her that I miss her and miss spending summers at her Chicago penthouse. Write to my dad and ask him why he hates us so much that he stays in LA, as far away as he can be while still being in "legal distance" from his minor daughter and her "guardian", which is really just Spike's Buffy Bot, repaired nightly by Willow and sometimes Giles, who hates to admit that he likes being mechanical now and then.  
  
I wrote down that I should clean my room, and donate my old clothes to Goodwill, and sign up for art class next semester in school. I should stop reading Spellbooks behind Willow's back, and I should stop being so mean to Anya. I should tell Tucker Nielsen across the street that he always has B.O. even though he stands there and hoses himself off for hours at a time after mowing the lawn. I should tell Giles to call Olivia and make up, because life is too short not to.  
  
I should redecorate this room so that it doesn't look like a baby lives here, I should seek out the Monks who made me and find out WHY they really did it. I should start liking food besides macaroni and cheese and toast.  
  
I should die so I can see Buffy again.  
  
By the time I'd filled the legal pad, there were still more things floating around in my head to DO. Ride a mechanical bull at a club, take tap dancing lessons, sit front-row at an *NSYNC concert. The list went on and on and on and on and on.  
  
And I couldn't stop, which is how I started writing in my journal again. The empty one, with the picture of the Angel on the cover, was the only paper I had left in this world after making my list on everything from the margins in last year's school notebook to the tag hanging from my mattress pad.  
  
So I opened the journal, and I wrote, and wrote, and wrote.  
  
And I realized what I was doing, but I didn't stop.  
  
I didn't stop because when I was writing in the journal, I wasn't staring at the wall.  
  
I wasn't not cleaning my room.  
  
I wasn't not being nice to Anya.  
  
I was writing. The most insignificant thing in the world was a turning point for me.  
  
It was something to do.  
  
So every night, when the girls down the hall are asleep and mumbling silly things to each other in their dreams, I sat on my bed now, and I write.  
  
It's better than staring.  
  
And it's all I have.  



End file.
